Hi. After upgrade from Linux Mint 18.3 to 19 i have a problem with font settings: In all system application e.g. notifications applet, menu, bottom bar and in all apps with root privilege e.g. Synaptic i have terrible ugly fonts with no anti-aliasing. In standard apps for example nemo, chrome etc fonts look exactly as I set in font settings. To better illustrate the problem I attach screenshot the same app in standard privilege (proper fonts appearance) and with root privilege (ugly fonts appearance). Does anyone have an idea how to solve the problem?

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Last edited by turambar on Mon Nov 19, 2018 7:37 am, edited 1 time in total.

i honestly can't tell the different in the pictures, but then again my eye sight is getting older. if anything i think your root fonts look more antialiased than the non-root
but any way first thing to try is to refresh the font cache
delete ALL files in /var/cache/fontconfig/ and in .cache then open Terminal and run sudo fc-cache -f -v

i honestly can't tell the different in the pictures, but then again my eye sight is getting older. if anything i think your root fonts look more antialiased than the non-root
but any way first thing to try is to refresh the font cache
delete ALL files in /var/cache/fontconfig/ and in .cache then open Terminal and run sudo fc-cache -f -v

Heh, I'm not sure if we've got better or worse eyes:

Screenshot at 2018-11-06 14-38-27.png (8.93 KiB) Viewed 580 times

Left side is admin, right side is regular. Same as you, I liked the left side better (at regular size), the extreme anti-aliasing on the right (regular user) isn't for me.

Anyway, I suppose depending on how you launch a root browser it might get launched under the root profile's anti-aliasing settings. Although I wasn't aware that you could have different settings applied on the same desktop. But hey, I can't see it, anyway, without a magnifying glass.

slowly i see more and more updates not touching my old config files that are spread all over the root and home. there's no way for me to know which are now obsolete , redundant or just conflicting. i keep the fonts.conf in case some apps need it. seems there a battle between GTK and QT desktops and they both want to do things their way.
didn't even know they already started working on GTK4 around 2016 who knows what mess that will bring when they decide to switch to that

slowly i see more and more updates not touching my old config files that are spread all over the root and home. there's no way for me to know which are now obsolete , redundant or just conflicting. i keep the fonts.conf in case some apps need it. seems there a battle between GTK and QT desktops and they both want to do things their way.
didn't even know they already started working on GTK4 around 2016 who knows what mess that will bring when they decide to switch to that

I hear you. Frankly those config (and other) files all over the place is probably the thing I often find the most infuriating about about Linux systems. We've got GNOME's dconf as a Windows registry adjacent, freedesktop.orgs various attempts at some standardization, ~/.config as a mostly ignored idea and a reality of programs littering their stuff all over your system.

And the GTK vs QT thing will probably keep going in the direction that a number of desktops do it now by combining the both of them. GTK is way too inflexible about some things and GTK4 will be the same mess all over again as far as that goes, but it has the advantage of being built around a full desktop environment, whereas Qt is more general purpose. Therefore we'll see more of GTK/GNOME infrastructure with Qt GUI. Depends a bit on where the Wayland thing goes, too, although that is slightly stillborn tbh, I hope someone pushes the boundary a bit more instead.

GTK 4 will coexist with GTK 3.x in the same way that 3.x currently coexists with GTK 2.x, so there isn't going to be immediate breakage when it gets to a stable release and most DE's will likely have a mix of GTK4, GTK3, GTK2 and QT apps. It will be a big headache for GTK themers who will need to maintain 3 to 4 different GTK themes in one theme package and developers will need to decide at what point they want to migrate their applications to GTK 4.

Unfortunately in Linux Mint 19 (in my case, perhaps it is cause by upgrade from 18.3 to 19) there is no fontconfig folder in any location in home directory.

I believe their suggestion was for you to create it along with the configuration file. As I said above, by default those settings are configured in the dconf database, that's why that folder wouldn't exist by default.